We shall die in darkness....

I'm not in a morbid mood. I just got off the phone with a good friend from a non-cemetery field project, but I've been contemplating religion, mortality and archaeology a lot lately and I've come up with some really interesting ideas. Unfortunately, I have this job, which makes it difficult for me to blog them though there is time to contemplate while trying not to get hit by cars on the walk to work. (Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the job and if I'm not as grateful as I should be, I'll try to be more grateful. But I found this poem, this beautiful poem reprinted in a Barbara Michaels book "Be buried in the rain" . It's wonderful so I wanted to link it here, so I'd be able to find a copy to read again at my leisure.

Here it is:

Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room.
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under the cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.

Let us go home, and sit in the sitting-room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.
Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed uprooted -
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.

What from the splendid dead
We have inherited -
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued -
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does not overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.

Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children's children this beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.


And my source, of course. Edna St Vincent Millay was the author. In general, she and I would probably not have gotten along. An advocate of free love and open marriage in the nineteen twenties, she must have been quite a woman. Personally, I believe in freedom, but I think the desire to have an open marriage stems from two things.

1) The belief in your own ability not to commit to one person forever

2) The fear that an open marriage is the only way to keep someone committed to you forever.

That's how my mind works any way. Also, I'm afraid I'd fall in love with someone other than my husband and then want to be married to him instead....I mean what's the point in getting married then? Why not just be "friends"? I don't get it, obviously. But she was a feminist in those exciting flapper days! That must have been fascinating. She also turns an excellent phrase. Her other poetry also is quite descriptive. That's one thing I admire about Barbara Michaels; she finds wonderful authors and excellent phrases.

As an archaeologist I've always gotten a little chill at the expression "Be of good cheer! No man is immortal!" It was the pleasant kind of chill for some reason. Ms. Michaels uses the quote often. She'd probably hate my bizarre Catholic philosophy with her obviously Calvinist/Atheistic perspective, but I admire her writing nonetheless and I don't see any reason we need to agree on religious philosophy since I love her feminist philosophy. I can't remember what phase of feminism she was...I zoned out on the "phases of feminism" lecture in sociology. I know what I want and I don't really care to have my opinions categorized by phase as though I should logically progress or revert to some alternate phase.

But anyway. I wrote this blog to share my admiration of two excellent female authors. And that beautiful phrase they have given us "We shall die in darkness and be buried in the rain...." How lovely! I also like the end lines of the poem :

"Leaving to our children's children this beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe. "

I don't think I'm a pessimist, but I think we could live better and I think it's part of the nature of humanity and perhaps all animals to strive to live better.

But it's past my bedtime. I doubt I'll expand further on this poem, this page is not meant for a literary critique.